A PSA you will hopefully never need.

[catsittingstill]

The corpses of people who died of something other than disease are not a health risk.  The bacteria that cause decay in dead meat are unable to infect normal living humans.  This is an issue because the belief that corpses cause disease leads to over-hasty measures to deal with corpses, which sometimes come at the cost of time and effort that could have dealt with more urgent  health problems like sanitation and clean water.

I earnestly hope that you will never need to know this.  But just in case, I thought I would pass it on.

Comments

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Oh, but this sort of thing is great stuff to know if you write stories! There's need, and there's need, you know. I wouldn't mind needing to know it for a story, especially now that I do know it!

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Nope, just ash me and contact the ferry system...

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Although nobody wants to know about this kind of thing in the most direct, personal way, I think it's very important that everyone know it as a general knowledge kind of thing. Even if the closest we ever get to handling a natural disaster is choosing which charity we will give money to, it's important for us to know what the people doing disaster relief should be doing, and what is wasting resources during the critical time, so that we can recognize charities that are doing the right thing and support them.

One thing that occurs to me in particular: The article says, "[t]he highest risk period is weeks to a month after the disaster and isn't related to the dead bodies." That sounds to me like people start out being very worried about contamination right away, but just about the time that they're getting worn down and tired of being careful about boiling their water, and tired of digging another latrine pit when the old one is full, is the time when the epidemic starts. So not only mentioning that dead bodies aren't the danger, but shouting it from the rooftops and carving it in mirror image on clue-by-fours to smack the people who panic about bodies so that the truth is left stamped on their foreheads, sounds like a good start at actually saving lives.

Any bandwidth that we use to talk rationally about how to actually prevent or mitigate future disasters is bandwidth that's not being devoted to disaster porn. I don't think the media is actually worse with this year's disasters than it was with last year's or the year's before, but I find the incessant "here's a poor bereaved peasant who doesn't speak any English, let's broadcast to the world about how terrible it is that they're holding the squashed body of their child" even more stomach-turning this year.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Huh, I did not know that. But I would have been more concerned with sanitation anyway.

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

I'd always thought that dead bodies (animal or human) in water contaminated the drinking source. In _Four_Years_In_Paradise_, Osa Johnson goes on at length at how they had to get dead drowned monkeys out of a source of drinking water so that the water wouldn't be contaminated, and how the natives that had drunk from the contaminated water anyway got quite ill.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that I believe that individual graves is a human right (though I agree it's an important social custom), but I certainly agree that people need to stop panicking about dead bodies. This was a very interesting article - thanks for linking to it.